drugarebadfandomcom-20200214-history
PCP (Phencyclidine)
Why is PCP bad??? So.... a little anatomy to start! Your brain is mostly made of glia, which are support cells, they feed the neurons since your neurons are too busy doing brain things to actually support themselves. The actual thinking is done by your neurons. They look like this like this... )))OOOOOOO-------<<<<< You have a huge number of these lined up in series with a little gap between the receiving end and the sending end... The ")" being dendrite, which receive signals. When you do drugs, they bind to or stop your regular chemicals from binding to various different parts of your dendrite. When something binds to a receptor on the dendrite, it excites the cell. The cell will receive the action and send it to the next cell in line. The "O" is the cell body, which will acts on info received from other cells. Your neurons create a charge in the cell body, which varies based on what receptor is active at the time. If let's say...dopamine (stimmy and happy, coke acts on dopamine) was being bound to on the dendrite, the cell would receive the signal and act on it. The cell body sends a different charge for any given neurotransmitter. For simplicity, I only used one dendrite, but there are usually a ton of them The "-" is the axon. This is where the signal is send down. Grey matter sends signals along the axon in a straight line; white matter takes a short cut (that would take a while to explain) and send signals faster. It's a pretty simple system that uses chemicals of different charges and reverses them to carry the charge (not important!). The "<" is your axon terminal, which is full of neurotransmitters. When they receive the charge, they send out whatever neurotransmitter the charge corresponds to. When the chem is done doing its job on the cell it's connected to, it gets taken back into the axon and reused, which is why taking 5-htp before psys is bad, since you naturally don't have that much serotonin in you and your body will be in shock once its all used up. Now that that's done, now for the PCP bits! PCP isn't entirely soluble in water. Since your body is mostly water, PCP forms crystals wherever it happens to decide that it isn't fun being free floating anymore! Most of the time after smoking it, this will be in your brain. This happens for a few reasons. =PCP binds to both sides of the neuron, axon and dendrite. It binds to the NMDA receptor, which is on the axon terminal, basically it prevents certain neurotransmitters from being sent out. The NMDA receptor is speculated to act in two ways. One, it's a port. So, actual neurotransmitters would normally be flowing through it if it wasn't backed up by the drugged. Two, it could act as a receiving site on the terminal itself. So, it would just tell the brain to stop putting out a given amount of neurotransmitter. It also acts on the dendrite, where it binds to a menagerie of places. If it wasn't acting on the other side of the synaptic gap, it would be a normal drug, but it's not really... =When you take in PCP it will recrystallize in our neurons and stick itself onto your recieving site and less likely, onto your sending site on the axon. IF that happens! Well, it's not good... The PCP can recrystallize along the gap and cause a massive short circuit. Since it's solidifying along both sides of the gap, the crystals can bind together and go terribly awry! Olney's Lesions occur when the gap closes and you basically fry your neurons together. Your cells can sense it, but will send terribly strange and possibly interesting mixed messages to other cells. If your cells die, it's just another brain cell lost...or probably lots of them all at once (which the brain has a hard time recovering from). But, some will stay healthy and keep the connection going, causing whatever happened in your brain to stay in there, hence permanent delusions, speech disorders, crazy thoughts, etc. =Any questions? ~Love Tokey <333